Can Electroconvulsive Therapy Alter Retinal Nerve Fiber Layer Thickness of Patients With Depression

Major depression (MD) is a mood disorder that is common in the society, has negative effects on emotion, thought and behavior, and leads to significant impairments in functionality. Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is a highly effective and reliable biological treatment method used in psychiatric diseases for a long time. The most common use in psychiatry is depression. Studies have shown that ECT causes a broadly distributed increase in brain gray matter volume (especially the temporal lobe) in MD patients. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a non-invasive medical imaging method that displays biological tissue layers by taking high resolution tomographic sections. Alterations in the thickness of the retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL), which is a layer of the ganglion cell complex in the retina of the eye and consists of ganglion cell axons, occur due to axonal damage in the retinal nerve tissue. Since RNFL is in a similar form with the brain gray matter tissue, recently, neurological and psychiatric studies have been conducted to provide data regarding the neurodegeneration occurring in the brain tissue. In the study, it is aimed to assess the possible cortical volume changes of patients by measuring changes in the retinal layers due to ECT in patients with depression. In other words, considering that ECT causes an increase in brain volume, it is to observe whether this increase is reflected in the retinal nerve fiber layer thickness.